Fishing at Monkey Pond, Piscataquis County, Maine

• Overview

  Within Piscataquis County, Maine, you have Monkey Pond. What surrounds it is rolling bush. Surface area runs to about 21 acres — small enough to read in one session. It is high ground by Maine standards. Millinocket is the closest place, 23 miles off. The big place round here is Lévis, 124 miles distant. No county line comes close, which keeps the paperwork simple.

• Where to Fish on Monkey Pond

  No chart reached our records; the first cast is your sounding. The productive water is a rod length or two out, not a hundred. Bays and points beat straight shoreline every time on water like this. Reported across Piscataquis County: Atlantic salmon, rainbow smelt, brook trout, brown trout and Arctic charr. Several of these carry legal protection or closed seasons; the rulebook comes before the rod. Monkey Pond gives up its fish to patience rather than distance.

• Seasonal Patterns

  Between January at about 10°F and July at about 64°F, the water has a wide range to work through. Winter shuts the surface down for months. Expect a solid lid for months and a thaw around late April. Break-up sits around late April on average, with the water closing again about late November. Fish feed hardest at the start and the close of the open season. Monkey Pond fishes to that pattern most years.

• Tackle & Baits

  We hold no note on access for this one. No slipway, car park or made path shows up nearby in mapping, so treat access as rough. For the bass here, soft plastics worked slow along cover and a spinnerbait for searching do most of the work. Some banks are open only from a marked point. Close seasons apply to some species and not others. For a change of water, Little Rocky Pond is 0.6 miles distant. None of that is settled for Monkey Pond in what we hold.